Statistics

Hotkey	Alt+K
Right-click menu	Statistics

PieceWorx Writing Studio provides detailed statistics for all of the pages in your notebook. Using the Alt+K hotkey or right-click menu you can display the Statistics Dialog.

Current Page Tab

The statistics dialog contains up to three tabs, the first of which is the Current Page tab. In this tab, the first thing you will see is the full path of the page based on the hierarchical structure of your notebook:

The full path in this case indicates that the current page, Lorem Ipsum, is a child of the page named Test.

The statistics presented for the current page include the following:

• Character Count
• Word Count
• Sentence Count
• Average Characters Per Word
• Average Words Per Sentence
• Coleman-Liau Index

The first three items, character count, word count and sentence count, are self explanatory. They are used primarily to measure content length targets.

The last three statistics Average Characters Per Word, Average Words Per Sentence and Coleman-Liau Index are used primarily for assessing readability and quality.

The Coleman-Liau Index is similar to other readability metrics such as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula, also known as the FK score.

The Coleman-Liau Index is a number which approximates the U.S. grade level associated with the written text. Note that for the most accurate scores you need around 300 words or more in your content. You may see crazy numbers or even negative numbers in some cases where there is little or unusual content.

The Coleman-Liau Index lends itself to computerized calculation because it does not require the counting of syllables which is something difficult for a computer to do accurately. Many of the readability tests including the FK score rely on counting of syllables.

A readability assessment is important for writers because readability is one of the most important qualities of good writing. Indeed, studies show that authors who use fewer big words, not more, are perceived as more intelligent.

In the end, if you wish to write well, write clearly. The Coleman-Liau score in the statistics dialog is one of your best tools for helping with this. Authors will vary, but shoot for a readability grade level around 7 to 9 for most types of writing.

Current and Children Tab

Depending on the amount of content it may take a few seconds for PieceWorx Writing Studio to analyze all pages when you move to the Current and Children tab.

You will notice in the following screen capture that we see multiple sets of the standard statistical quantities described above. The first analysis is titled Current Page and All Child Pages. This set of statistics contains numbers for the combined text of the current page and all children of the current page. These numbers might be useful for when the current page is a chapter introduction and the child pages are all subsections of the chapter. Then these statistics tell you the numbers for you whole chapter.

The second set of statistics is for just the children of the current page, excluding any content in the current page itself. Again, this allows you to see the overall statistics for say, all chapters, without having to merge the chapters into a separate page first.

Below these sets of numbers, you will have the stats for each individual page including your current page and any children.

All Pages Tab

The All Pages tab is similar to the others. It begins with a set of statistics for the entire notebook. In the screen capture below you can see for this particular notebook, which contains a couple copies of Moby Dick, that the total word count is more than 451,000 words. The character count is nearly 3 million.

After the initial set of stats for the entire notebook, stats for each individual page are listed.